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Saturday, 10 March 2012

US DOE makes a commitment for advancing Small Modular Reactors

US DOE makes a commitment for advancing Small Modular Reactors: http://energy.gov/articles/energy-department-announces-small-modular-reactor-technology-partnerships-savannah-river ... also see: http://www.examiner.com/nuclear-energy-in-national/doe-signs-agreement-to-move-forward-on-small-modular-reactor-testing
: "SMR’s have been a hot topic in the nuclear industry for a while now
and were developed to solve three large issues that face the industry as
it stands today. The first is cost. With a new, large-scale plant
costing somewhere in the six to eight billion dollar range, power
companies are having a tough time finding the financing to pay for them.
A large part of the construction cost comes from building and
certifying the reactor. In contrast, SMRs could be built and certified
in a factory and shipped to the actual power plant site, greatly
reducing the costs involved. Also, since SMRs are smaller than their
larger brothers, they are much cheaper, meaning smaller power companies
will be able to bring the capital together to build them. The second
issue is refueling. Refueling a large reactor takes a great deal of
time, during which electricity is not being provided to the public.
Nuclear fuel has to be transported to the site, the reactor has to be
disassembled, and the fuel swapped out. Then the old fuel has to be
stored somewhere. SMRs deal with this problem by being a total-package
deal. The reactor is shipped to the site, and once it runs out of juice,
the reactor is shipped back. No on-site refueling, no interruption of
power production (as long as you got your new reactor in before you ship
the old one back), and no on-site storage of spent nuclear fuel. The
third issue is size. Nuclear power plants up till now have been big,
base load providing, power plants. These days the DOE is moving toward a
distributed approach to energy, meaning lots of smaller power plants
spread out along the grid, and SMRs are the nuclear industry’s answer to
that approach. Beyond just their application in the power industry
though, SMRs could also be used to provide process heat for industrial
applications, such as hydrogen production. Up till now though SMRs
have been a nice thought, with some Autocad drawings and a few
calculations done, but they remain untested. With access to a test
facility, the three companies named above will be building their designs
for actual use. Hopefully through testing they’ll discover that the SMR
concept is still feasible and doable, while still solving the cost and
refueling issues of the past."

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Welcome to the Future of Neutron Scattering in Canada
a grassroots, nonpartisan movement of ordinary Canadians
that emerged in response to the lack of commitment by federal government(s) to build a new research reactor in Canada for nearly 2 decades.